Striatal action-value neurons reconsidered

Abstract

It is generally believed that during economic decisions, striatal neurons represent the values associated with different actions. This hypothesis is based on studies, in which the activity of striatal neurons was measured while the subject was learning to prefer the more rewarding action. Here we show that these publications are subject to at least one of two critical confounds. First, we show that even weak temporal correlations in the neuronal data may result in an erroneous identification of action-value representations. Second, we show that experiments and analyses designed to dissociate action-value representation from the representation of other decision variables cannot do so. We suggest solutions to identifying action-value representation that are not subject to these confounds. Applying one solution to previously identified action-value neurons in the basal ganglia we fail to detect action-value representations. We conclude that the claim that striatal neurons encode action-values must await new experiments and analyses.

Data availability

The data of the basal ganglia recordings from (Ito and Doya 2009) is available online at https://groups.oist.jp/ncu/data and was analyzed with permission from the authors. Motor cortex data (recorded by Oren Peles in Eilon Vaadia's lab) and auditory cortex data (taken from the recordings in (Hershenhoren, Taaseh, Antunes, & Nelken, 2014)) is available at https://github.com/lotem-elber/striatal-action-value-neurons-reconsidered-codes (Elber-Dorozko & Loewenstein 2018). The custom MATLAB scripts used to create simulated neurons and to analyze simulated and recorded neurons are also available at https://github.com/lotem-elber/striatal-action-value-neurons-reconsidered-codes.

The following previously published data sets were used

1. Ito M
2. Doya K
(2009) Validation of decision-making models and analysis of decision variables in the rat basal ganglia.
Publicly available at webpage of lab.

https://groups.oist.jp/ncu/data

Article and author information

Author details

Lotem Elber-Dorozko

The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

For correspondence
lotem.elber@mail.huji.ac.il

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1235-8651
Yonatan Loewenstein

The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Israel Science Foundation (757/16)

Yonatan Loewenstein

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CRC1080)

Yonatan Loewenstein

Gatsby Charitable Foundation

Yonatan Loewenstein

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

Timothy E Behrens, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Publication history

Received: December 11, 2017
Accepted: May 13, 2018
Accepted Manuscript published: May 31, 2018 (version 1)
Version of Record published: June 19, 2018 (version 2)

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.